Income Inequality as Sufficient Statistic | Professor Danny Quah (NUS) | The Annual Hicks Lecture

The Annual Hicks Lecture 2023 presented by Professor Danny Quah - Li Ka Shing Professor in Economics and Dean at the National University of Singapore.
About this lecture - Many social challenges have been said recently to reflect the deep inequalities in society. Observers have hypothesised, for instance that, as just one example, the coronavirus pandemic has resulted in the poor becoming even poorer. However, as a matter of logic, this immiserisation of those already poor is independent of the existence of the rich. What hobbles someone's fight against the coronavirus is their resource-inadequacy, not the fact that someone else in society happens to have more than they do. This paper argues that, outside of zero-sum games, income inequality is no sufficient statistic, and its causality for social ills suspect. The paper develops evidence that suggests the reason inequality matters in the public perception is not rational but, instead, simply correlated noise, i.e., a bubble.
Lecture presented: 27th February 2023, Manor Road Building, Oxford
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